The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907

6. The Nationalisation of the Land and Money Rent

Aninteresting economic argument against nationalisation
was advanced by A. Finn, an advocate of division of the land. Both
nationalisation and municipalisation, he says, mean transferring rent to a
public body. The ques tion is: what kind of rent? Not capitalist rent, for
“usually the peasants do not obtain rent in the capitalist sense from
their land” (The Agrarian Question and Social-Democracy,
p. 77, cf. p. 63), butpre-capitalistmoney rent.

Bymoney rent Marx means the payment by the peasant to the landlord of
the whole of the surplus product in the form of money. The original form of
the peasant’s economic dependence upon the landlord under the
pre-capitalist modes of production was labour rent (Arbeitsrente),
i. e., corv6e; then came rent in the form of produce, or rent in kind, and
finally came money rent. That rent, says A. Finn, “is the most
widespread form in our country even today” (p. 63).

Undoubtedly,tenant farming based on servitude and bondage is extremely
widespread in Russia, and, according to Marx’s theory, the payment
which the peasant makes under such a system of tenancy is largely money
rent. What power makes it possible to extortthatrent from the
peas antry? The power of the bourgeoisie and of developing capitalism? Not
at all. It is the power of the feudal latifundia. Since the latter will be
broken up—and that is the starting-point and fundamental condition of
the peasant agrarian revolution—there is no reason to speak of
“money rent” in the pre-capitalist sense. hence, the only
signifi cance of Finn’s argument is that he emphasises once more the
absurdity ofseparatingthe peasant allotment land from the rest
of the land in the event of an agrarian revolution; since allotment lands
are often surrounded by landlords’ lands, and since thepresentconditions of demarcation of the peasant lands from the landlords’ lands
give rise to bondage, the preservation of this demarcation isreactionary.Unlike eUher division of the land or nationalisation,
municapallsation preserves this demarcation.

Ofcourse, the existence of small landed property, or, more correctly, of small
farming, introduces certain changes in the general propositions of the theory of
capitalist. rent, but it does not destroy that theory. For example, Marx points
out that absolute rent as such does not usually exist under small farming,
which is carried on mainly to meet the needs of the farmer himself (Vol. III,
2. Teil,

S. 339, 344).[2]But the more commodity production develops, the moreallthe propositions of economic theory become applicable to
peasant farming also, since it has come under the conditions of the
capitalist world. It must not be forgottenthat no land nationalisation, no equalised land tenure, will abolish the
now fully established fact that the well-to-do peasants in Russia are
already farming on capitalist lines. In myDevelopment of
CapitalismI showed that, according to the statistics of the eighties
and nineties of the last century, about one-fifth of the peasant house
holds account forup to halfof peasant agricultural production
and a much larger share ofrented land; that the farms of these
peasants are now commodity-producing farms rather than natural-economy
farms, and that, finally,thesepeasants cannot exist without a
vast army of farm-hands and

			    day-labourers.[1]Amongthesepeasants the elements ofcapitalistrent are
taken for granted.Thesepeasants express their interests through
the mouths of the Peshekhonovs, who “soberly” reject the
prohibition of hired labour as well as “socialisation of the
land”, who soberly champion the point of view of the peasant economic
individualism which is asserting itself. If, in the utopias of the
Narodniks, we carefully separate the real economic factor from the false
ideology, we shall see at once that it is precisely the bourgeois peasantry
which stands to gain most from the break-up of the feudal latifundia,
irrespective of whether that is carried out by division, nationalisation,
or municipalisation. “Loans and grants” from the state, too,
are bound to benefit the bourgeois peasantry in the first place. The
“peasant agrarian revolution” is nothing but the subordination
of the whole system of land ownership to the conditions of progress and
prosperity of precisely these capitalist farms.

Moneyrent is the moribund yesterday, which cannot but die
out. Capitalist rent is the nascent tomorrow, which cannot but develop
under the Stolypin expropriation of the poor peasants (“under Article
87”), as well as under the peasant expropriation of the richest
landlords.

[1]Seepresent edition, Vol. 3, pp. 136-39.—Ed.

[2]Ibid.,pp. 785, 789-90.